Apple speaks: the Australian scam did not put iCloud accounts in jeopardy

Just yesterday, we passed on the news that a lot of Apple devices across Australia have been locked up by wrongdoers, who apparently knew the unfortunate victims' Apple ID passwords and abused iCloud's Find My iPhone service. The crackers then asked for ransom and requested a certain sum of money to be transferred to an unexisting PayPal account. The affected users were advised to raise the matter to Apple so as to recoup control of their devices. Sadly, it seems that the scam has since affected even more individuals across the USA, Canada, and New Zealand.

To all appearances, numerous user reports reached Cupertino, as the tech giant came up with an official statement about the scam: “Apple takes security very seriously and iCloud was not compromised during this incident. Impacted users should change their Apple ID password as soon as possible and avoid using the same user name and password for multiple services. Any users who need additional help can contact AppleCare or visit their local Apple Retail Store".

Hopefully, unaffected Apple users will take the necessary precautions in a timely manner and either change their Apple ID password or set up two-step verification on their accounts.

They mostlikely phished their passwords first through ficticious emails from "Apple" asking them to "verify their iCloud" password and thus feeding them the passwords... This is technically user error as you can do this with your own bank account, your own cell phone accounts, Facebook, Gmail, etc. You just have t be smart and not get phished in the first place.

If this were a phishing scam Apple would be reminding people not to share their passwords. Just about all companies remind you that they they will never ask for it during these types of incidents as reassurance.
Unless that bit was included in a lengthier press release, then phishing was most likely not the means of execution.

Whatever the Droidfans are just as a problem, they're like atheists obsessed with fighting a religion LOL. Most apple users dont care what you think cuz theyir product works fine. They don't even know Droidmonots exist or what they have to say xD.. Droid fans feel like being vocal on iPhones, first cuz they have crappy jobs and can't afford apple, or two cuz they're tech savy nerds who want to hack their phone which eventually turns them into hipsters, and hipsters hate everything that is popular lol.

I'm not Apple fan, but have to say this is a security problem, not an enviroment one. This can happen to every service that uses a password as login.

Back when I was in university, you had to do your inscription and select you schedule via web, but if for some reason your account got locked you had to go to the school to get it unlocked, this way those that had their turn asigned at the begining of the process lose time unlocking their accounts, while those with later turns had more probabilities to build a better schedule.

Of course, those who were asigned the last turns were the ones locking the acounts.

The 'hacking' happens on your own end when you get on a phishing website and hand over your passwords, or download spyware on your computer that ends up sending everything you type to a server somewhere - then they look through your key strokes till you type something like "yourname"@icloud.com immediately follwed by password3453453 then they get on your account, lock your device and ask for ransom.

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